Blog Archives - trish hermanson

Meet the 'Late Bloomer'

8/27/2020

Compared to other plants, this is a late bloomer. This agave americana was a squatty thing for several decades before it suddenly shot up and burst into outrageous yellow flowers. But it doesn’t blossom until its internal resources tell it to, which is good news for those of us who feel like we’re still squatty plants while our peers have shot ahead of us.
     Most of us don’t really “take off” until the second half of our lives because our intelligence doesn’t fully develop until we reach our thirties to fifties, says author Rick Karlgaard. That seems to be true with our skills, too. Take, for instance, actor Morgan Freeman, who didn’t achieve name recognition until his early fifties and he’s still going strong in his eighties. Or Abraham Lincoln, who had more failures than successes until he was elected president in his early fifties. Or Julia Child, a failed author until she co-published her book on French cooking when she was forty-nine.
     Karlgaard, who wrote “Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement,” says flourishing “is all about finding that perfect intersection of your deepest talents and your deepest passions.” This can happen multiple times in our lives because we live longer these days.
     That’s been true for me: one metamorphosis after another as I dared to allow my God-given passions mingle with talents I worked to develop.
  What about you? What passion do you want to develop?

The Strangest Recycling Program

8/20/2020

That’s my grandson Oak reaching toward a stash of shells we found strewn across a beach near his home in Alabama. He and I were observing the strangest recycling program - gorgeous shells washed up and ground into sand by the force of wind, waves, and feet.
     It’s mysterious to me why God trashes part of creation when it’s at its peak in beauty. But then, I thought about how sand becomes the building block for construction, the primary raw material to create concrete and glass.
     It’s a grand recycling scheme, something that I suppose we’ve all undergone. Did you ever get demoted? Swept out of a high-profile position into something less noticeable? It feels like a drop in status, but perhaps it’s actually a stepping stone into something closer to what you were made to do.
     Like a seashell, sometimes I’ve felt washed up on life’s shore, crushed in my aspirations by the wind, waves, and feet of others. Perhaps I was getting repurposed. Perhaps I was, as Jesus described, like a seed that must be buried before it can sprout into leaves, flowers, and fruit. Being recycled can be painful. Often it demands risk, as Peter Mayer describes in this song about pumpkins that face being repurposed out of their patch.

What Ruby Bridged Taught Me about Hatred

8/13/2020

     I gasped at the destruction at our city center as I walked toward the Denver Art Museum. Statues defaced by protesters, buildings graffitied.
     But when I entered the museum, it wasn’t my Covid mask that left me breathless. It was this Norman Rockwell painting capturing a six-year-old desegregating a school in New Orleans in 1960. Day after day Ruby Bridges entered the school to the taunts of protesters who screamed they wanted to poison her. One morning before Ruby entered, she paused, and her lips moved. When she went inside, her teacher asked, “What were you saying?”
     “I was praying for the people in the street,” Ruby said. “I pray for them every morning and every afternoon when I go home.” She usually prayed from several blocks away, but that day she forgot. So she stopped at the school steps, turned toward the rioters, and asked God to be good to them and forgive them “because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
     These days we often feel that others don’t know what they’re doing. Of course “our side” is right. It’s the “other side” that’s lunatic.
  But I’m weary of the hatred, including from myself. It’s poisonous. I think it’s time I pray like Ruby that God will be good to those I disagree with. I ought to pray for “my side,” too, because it doesn’t always know what it’s doing.
     Maybe, just maybe, I’ll discover I have something in common with someone from the “other side,” as Cosy Sheridan sings about in this song.

How Gertie Has Spent Her 108 Years

8/4/2020

Gertie Abkes of Denver turned 108 today and hoped to get 108 cards as a gift. She was born four months after the Titanic sank and has survived two pandemics. During her lifetime, the world has moved from model T’s to Mars rovers, and I asked her what she thought about all the changes.
     “It’s just lifestyle changes,” she told me matter-of-factly over the phone.
     “So what’s the secret of your many years?”
     She chuckled. “I guess God knows what he wants to do with me, and I follow His path. But I’m just an ordinary person.”
     Gertie worked as a nurse. She and Leonard had no children, and were married for six-two years until he died of cancer. She hated to give up her Buick when she quit driving at 100. She watches baseball on Saturdays (she told me the scores ), keeps her apartment clean, and wonders what Trump will do. Ordinary things.
     Gertie reminds me of how unspectacular most of our lives are. Every day we put one foot in front of the other, and all the while God knows what he wants to do with us. For those who follow God’s path like Gertie, Henry Martyn says, “If (God) has work for me to do, I cannot die.” John Piper agrees: “I am immortal until my work is done.”
     So even in my many unspectacular days, my life matters, just as Gertie’s does. That comforts me.
     As for Gertie, word got out about her birthday, and she has received more than 400 cards.
     ***
     Photo: Clermont Park.